Joyfully At Home: Chapter Eight - Part One

Welcome to Chapter Eight of Jasmine Baucham's "Joyfully At Home"!  This chapter helps young women examine and move beyond a "false view of husbands". 

Honestly - the very term "false view of husbands" makes no sense to me.  This is a book written by an young unmarried sheltered woman to an audience of extremely young sheltered unmarried women.  How much of a false sense of husbands can they have?  They can't have had that many interactions with married women of their own generation to have much of a "sense of husbands"period.

Equally pertinent to me is the fact that the broad "view of husbands" is of marginal bearing on personal happiness compared to the very specific "view of MY husband" that these girls will one day be facing.   I worry very much that these girls and women will marry in the first heady blush of infatuation and be hurt badly when their relationship hits the normal growing pains that come with living together as a married couple.   Most married or committed couples in western society have a much wider series of life experiences prior to marriage that help young people learn that this current pain or struggle too will pass.   Going to high school and college brings awkward transitions that eventually become comfortable.  Working outside the home and safe confines of family always feels clunky and unwieldy at first - but people grow in skills.   Experiences like these serve as a touchstones for a young married couple navigating their first disagreements - that it is bumpy right now, but the bumps make for a stronger relationship later on.    Those touchstones also serve as a point of reference if things don't get better - and it is time to seek outside help.

Jasmine Baucham's recommendation at age 19 or so is to blame women's disappointments in marriage on having unreasonable expectations in the first place:

For so many of us young women, our ideal man might look like [ insert wildly attractive movie stars named here] on the outside , but, on the inside, his identity comes from making us happy. He is fine tuned to meet all our desires. He caters to our every romantic whim. He never disappoints us. He never aggravates us. He never falls short of our expectations, even though they hover somewhere in the stratosphere.

One young man once described him to me as the perfect man on the outside -- and the quintessential woman on the inside. We want a girlfriend on the inside and a husband on the outside, a hunter gatherer with Florence Nightingale tendencies. (pg. 93)

Of course your dream boyfriend is perfect; he's imaginary!  I think it's more mentally healthy to daydream about a man who fulfills all your needs and wants than to daydream about a man with carefully curated flaws.  Plus, most people understand that daydreams of the perfect job, the perfect lover, the perfect vacation will never translate - but a life experience is real so the mistakes, quirks and flaws are all part of the package.

Man, I'm still burnt-out from the Botkin Sisters' blathering "male friends" and really don't want to add Jasmine Baucham's male friends.   Actually, there's probably a pretty big overlap between the two groups since all of the women were in Vision Forum. 

Anyways.

 Am I supposed to believe that young men have a more mature and nuanced view of their future wives?  What few descriptions I've read seem to imply that many CP/QF young men view their future wives as adoring groupies who provide sex while doing all the work of cooking, maintaining the house, and rearing children.  That view isn't much more realistic than the women's imaginary boyfriends.

That last sentence makes me laugh.  Women apparently want a man who provides food for his family though wild sources and who also has time to demonstrate the power of using graphics to explain data while reforming the nursing profession.  This is going to be a hard combination to find, ladies!

I'm going to wake up one morning ( not right away, perhaps, but eventually) and realize that we were made to be the suitable helpers of flawed men, and not the other way around ( Genesis 2: 19- 25). Beyond that, we're flawed women who will react to flawed men, sometimes, in very flawed ways. Some days, there will be trouble in Paradise. And beyond that, we're not goddesses to be worshipped, but helpmeets who are going to be in the trenches. If we go into a marriage looking to have our needs met, we're eventually going to realize that marriage, like every other state of our lives, isn't about us. In fact, in many ways, marriage is less about us than singleness is. (pg. 94)

Listening to 19 year old Jasmine Baucham lecture about being in the trenches of marriage is both sweetly naive and so terribly young. 

She has no idea what being in the trenches looks like. 

We're approaching Spawn's third birthday (which I can't believe) so I am thinking frequently about the stress surrounding my severe rapid onset preeclampsia with HELLP syndrome while 26 weeks pregnant, Spawn's miraculous yet compromised birth, and the year of medical intervention that followed.   This may sound crazy - but I was often glad that if someone had to have a baby born very, very early, I was relieved/grateful that Spawn's birth happened to us rather than a teenage girl or young family.  The first week after Spawn was born was really rough since my preeclampsia didn't resolve after my son was born.  My OB kept me hospitalized for a week after Spawn was born because they couldn't find a drug regimen that kept my blood pressure under 150/85 - and I frequently had pressures in the 180/90 to 200/100 range when taken off of IV antihypertensives.  Between the 52 hours on IV magnesium sulfate, a variety of organs in the early stages of failure, abdominal surgery to get my son out, losing most of my blood volume from HELLP, continuing high blood pressure and all the hormonal changes of giving birth, I was physically shattered as well as emotionally hurting.  My husband was doing the best of us physically - but living in your wife's hospital room is exhausting before adding the stress of watching your wife and son struggling without being able to make it ok.  Plus, he was under a lot of pressure to return to work at the family farm starting the day after my son was born. 

The year after Spawn was born was just hard - but we got through it.  I did wonder - fairly often, actually - how much harder that year would have been if I was a young newlywed like Jill Dillard or Jessa Seewald instead of a older woman with lot of life experience.

I agree that married life can feel like you are in the trenches - but I disagree that the best way to prepare for marriage is to stay at home as an adult for spiritual reasons.  Resilience, endurance and communication are critical to surviving hard times in life.  We learn these skills through facing new, challenging situations and working through them.  While I suspect living at home is difficult at times, it often serves to keep women young and inexperienced rather than growing and mature.